Description
Book SynopsisPresents a history of the influence of Black musicians on the Beatles, exploring musical and storytelling legacies full of rich but contested symbolism and the transatlantic circulation of diaspora African arts, tropes, and symbols.
Trade Review“[T]here’s much to be savored.”
—starred review Library Journal
“Blackbird frequently makes productive connections between otherwise disparate cultural strands, thereby establishing a dialogic mosaic highlighting the ubiquity of bird imagery and its associated competing meanings. Interlinking religion, mythology, folklore, history, and art with chronologies of cross-cultural interpretations encompassing many geographical domains from an underexplored perspective, this book opens new critical space for consideration of race in African American and international Black creative contexts. Blackbird revises and reexamines relationships between the Beatles and Black cultures.”
—Mike Alleyne,Professor Emeritus, Department of Recording Industry, Middle Tennessee State University
“I do not believe this combination of artists and music has been treated anywhere else and applaud the authors for conceptualizing the subject in such an original way. Kapurch and Smith have combined the work of many artists to demonstrate the prevalence of songs based on birds and flight in the African American musical tradition, while also demonstrating the extent to which these same themes have appeared in the Beatles' oeuvre and Paul McCartney’s solo career.”
—Kenneth L. Campbell,author of The Beatles and the 1960s: Reception, Revolution and Social Change
Table of ContentsForeword—Cyrus Cassells
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Change the History; The Blackbird in Song,
Story, and Transatlantic Flight
1. Flee (Free) as a Bird: The Legacy of the Ring Shout, Flying Africans, and Gospel in Black Music and the Beatles
2. Sing a Song of Blackbird: Pre-Twentieth-Century Transatlantic Flights in Black Music, the Beatles, and Liverpool
3. I’m a Little Blackbird: Florence Mills, Blackbirds of the Harlem Renaissance, and the Beatles’ Jazz Age Predecessors
4. Flying Across the Ocean: Lead Belly, “Grey Goose,” and the Beatles’ Liverpool Skiffle Scene
5. You Can Fly Away: Lord Woodbine and Lord Kitchener, “Yellow Bird,” and Calypso in the Beatles’ Liverpool Club Scene
6. You Ain’t Ever Gonna Fly: Nina Simone’s “Blackbird” and Revolutionary Responses to the Beatles
7. A Blackbird on a White Album: Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Diana Ross, and Other Winged Inspirations in and around 1968
8. Like a Bird Up in the Sky: Billy Preston Flies to the Beatles in London and Circles Back to Los Angeles with “Blackbird”
9. Y’all Ready, Girls? “Blackbird” Soars in San Francisco with Sylvester, Two Tons O’ Fun, and the Band
10. I Was Just Seeing Myself Singing: Bettye LaVette on Interpreting the Beatles and Singing a Bridge of Blackbirds
Conclusion: Twenty-First-Century “Blackbird” in Paul McCartney’s Legend, for #BlackLivesMatter, and into Transoceanic Flightpaths
Notes
Bibliography
Index
